McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure (Sega Genesis) Review by Mike

Comments

Wow, this game has fuck all to do with McDonald’s, other than stylizing the player character as Ronald. Where is anything else related to Mcdonald’s restaurants or McDonald land? Leave it to Japanese devs to just make some goofy stuff instead that could have been any game, with a simple change of the main character sprite….

Mike theory about it perhaps being developed as another game originally and being changed to “add some McDonald’s” to it could be possible. It happened in Japan before when they changed the player characters in an unknown-to-the-west game, leaving most of the rest intact, other than than a “Super Mario 2” on the title screen on box for western audiences.

Don Skiver

September 25, 2014 at 1:16 am

Responding to your later comment. It absolutely could have been a completely different game and then the company could have been offered a bunch of money to make it into a McDonalds game. I mean, look at Journey to Silius. That game was originally going to be a game based on the first terminator movie, but ended up losing the license before they finished it (I think because terminator 2 was coming out soon and they wanted to hype up the new movie and new movies licensed stuff makes more money than old movie licensed stuff). So after Sunsoft lost the license to Terminator, they had so much of the game completed, they decided to just throw a story together (which is pretty damn weak, but what can you expect under the circumstances?) and release the game and try to make back some of the money spent on developing it.

Whatever service or application they are using, it sucks. The video lags and it choppy for me even if I open in Chrome or Firefox. I close all other tabs, reboot my machine, I have a 3.8ghz quad core processor, 6gigs of RAM, 18mbps download speed and shit STILL lags and is choppy even though Youtube and Vimeo vids play smoothy.
What is WITH this shittily optimized piece of garbage video player they are using?

We would love to increase our service to places like Nunuvut and Japan. Performance in the continental US is quite good, and we are always looking at ways to expand coverage to places like where you both live. We take these comments very seriously, and they drive our expansion decisions.

sirensofsilence

September 25, 2014 at 12:17 pm

I wonder if a VPN service would help you? My one can use a US-based server (I’m in Hong Kong) – altho even with the HK server the videos stream alright. Anyway, keep in mind that it helps Cinemassacre get revenue from their productions if they host them themselves (right?)

tabu

September 24, 2014 at 10:12 am

Hey Mike, review is nice, but nobody care about game with Ronald McDonald.
I really think you should make reviews of good classic games, like Super Metroid, Zelda aLttP or Chrono Trigger (Im a SNES fan;)
Opposite thing what James do, he is reviewing bad games, you should review good ones.

Im very curious what do you think about this idea, you could start a whole new regular series.
I bet that everyone here would want to see your reviews of our favourite games, even if there is many of them online. Maybe then Nerd finally meet Mike. Think about it, cheers.

Mike, James: You do know why the password systems are how they are, right?

The password you give must contain all the information about the game state it restores: player location, amount of lives, items, score, finished levels, beat bosses and whatnot. Not only that, but it also needs to encrypt this information (otherwise it wouldn’t be a password, but a game state selection screen) so that most combinations are invalid (to disencourage just trying random passwords).

If the game state is very simple, like just the level number, it can be encoded as simply a word for each level or a few symbols like in this game. But if the game has a more state like metroid or mega man x the amount of possible configurations the passwords must represent just skyrockets and is better replaced with a system for representing the game state information in a generic manner.

Instead of hand-crafting passwords for cases where the player is in level two with one life, two lives or three lives, the amount of lives and the level number are combined. Let’s assume a game has over 10 but under 100 levels and the player has at most 100 lives. (Grossly simplified example ahead. Nobody would do it this simply.) This information could be encoded, for example, as 0203 representing “level two, three lives”. Now, with just this the player could just try passwords and figure the password system out, getting any amount of lives in any level pretty fast. To counter this, we do a simple cipher by adding 99 – (lives + level) to the end (getting 020394) and adding the numbers “123456” to the numbers one at a time, wrapping them around from 10 to 0 and 12 to 2 and so on as needed. This gets us 143740, which is somewhat more obscure. To decode this password we subtract the “123456” (again wrapping over as needed) to get the original code, check that the last numbers match 99 – the sum of the first two to validate the password as correct and then restore the game state saved in the password.

Now consider the amount of information needed to contain the state of the games with complex or simple password systems. It’s most of the time not there to frustrate you, but a necessity for the password system to work at all.

Necessity or not, no gamer wants to spend five minutes inputting a password. The MSX version of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake had probably the worst password system ever in this regard. It’s passwords were 106 characters long!

Nice review, Mike. I’d like to know more about why you choose to review the games you review – what’s the hook (we all know James’ hook – shitty games!) You have a very intricate knowledge of this kind of pop culture which has contributed a lot to AVGN over the years, so it’s great that you’re doing your own stuff. Plus I’m a Megadrive child, so always happy to see Genesis reviews. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the review! Yeah this looks like a game that was originally something completely different and then they gave it the Doki Doki Panic treatment. There was potential to make a balls to the wall crazy McDonalds game with cheeseburgers flying everywhere, oh will missed opportunity.

I wish there was a rom hack where all the enemies were unhealthy obese customers and all the items were McDonald’s products. The plot would consist of Ronald taking over the world and collecting money to run his unstoppable global empire. One level could take place in a hospital where all the sick people are, another level could involve throwing advertisements at innocent civilians. There could be a parking lot level where there is trash scattered everywhere. The possibilities are endless!

Mike, Ronald McDonald, is motivated by greed (but that fact is not meant for kids to know). Dude is the most prolific cow and chicken killer in the world and he’s the number one contributer to obesity problems in America. He ruins people’s health and tortures and kills animals for profit. That’s one sick fuckin clown.

Mike I can answer some of the questions you had, but the answers aren’t particularly interesting even if they are fairly accurate.

Every level has “magic” in the title because the game was released during the “do you believe in magic?” campaign. It was McDonald’s tag line at the time.

None of the McDonald’s gang could be villains due to company policy. In the early 90’s they decided that all of the gang would be considered “good guys” from now on. Even the Hamburgler stopped stealing hamburgers soon after this and eventually all characters save Ronald and the Fry Guys were phased out. This was actually one of the last products to feature the whole gang.

Also in the early 90’s McDonalds started their “healthy choices” campaign. It wasn’t as Nazi-like as it is now, but they tried to avoid having Ronald directly market food to kids. I’m not sure if they had started in 93 yet, but it wasn’t long after that.

Hey Mike, I’m from Brazil and I bought this game in a trip to PAragay. In my version of the game the life bar were hamburgers, fries and coke, like in this SS:http://www.games4win.com/up/mcdonalds-treasure-land-adventure_2s.jpg
Also the plase where you buy itens was a mcdonalds restaurant. This was one of my favorite games for Genesis as a kid.

I disagree with the whole “If Ronald doesn’t care about the treasure, why should you?” bit. It’s clear that Ronald cared about the treasure up until finding it, but that was before realizing it already belonged to someone, a someone who Ronald just beat the crap out of. I’m betting Ronald really felt like the badguy when his little victim begged and pleaded for his life, so he just left well enough alone.

What a weird game! I never knew that this was out there, and I’d forgotten about Captain Crook and Cosmo. Who was the scientist with the McNugget buddies? I forgot him, too! Anyway, great video. Thanks!

No it is not a coincidence that treasure made that game since sega knew that treasure made really good games,even for one of your best selling fast food franchise.The company that made something plays a really big role when it comes to developing a title like that.The thing i dont get though is why sega dont show at all the treasure logo in frond of their game cover on the box.Its like they didn’t want to show from who was really made,except they did that on the back.The fact probably for not having food power ups and stuff is because they didn’t want to show to people eat more of those,and they didn’t put the characters you know because they are friends of ronald and not vilains? ferhaps who knows.

I’ll give you a clue to where I’ll be next…
The creator of this game stirred up massive internet controversy a few years back by posting nasty comments on his twitter account. His twitter avatar was Andy Kaufman. To see the answer to my riddle, find me on another video’s comment section that hasn’t had any comments in almost a year. Tally Ho!!!